by Jackson Ford
This is insane. Reggie’s dreamed of going pro, sure, pleasant daydreams spurred on by the almost liquid thrill she got as she rolled out onto the playhouse stage in Anaheim. But actually doing it? Come on.
Before she can process this thought, her phone – still in her hand – rings again. And this time, there’s no debate who it is. Reggie knows, even before she looks at the phone screen.
“Answer call,” she says, trying to ignore the pitter-pat of her heart. “Moira. It’s all under control. I haven’t found any evidence of what Teagan—”
Tanner cuts her off. Her breathy New England voice sounds unusually harassed. “Where is the team now?”
“They’re getting some food. What’s going on?”
“We have a situation.”
SEVEN
Teagan
When you’re in LA, and you’ve just wrapped up a hard day busting meth labs and beating up biker gangs, where do you go for a good meal?
Howlin’ Ray’s.
Howlin’. Motherfuckin’. Ray’s.
The greatest hot chicken in history. Fine, that may or may not be true, but who cares? As I take a bite of the sandwich, the glorious, crispy breast, firm bun and tangy slaw compact together into a magnificent, salty, crunchy, garlicky delicious mouthful. At that moment, I am a hundred per cent sure that there has never been a better bird.
And that’s before the burn hits you. This is Nashville hot chicken, and I like mine so spicy it burns the top three layers off my tongue.
The quake torpedoed a lot of LA’s finest restaurants. Which was a bummer, obviously. But LA’s food scene is known for its food trucks and hole-in-the-wall operations, and it didn’t take much for those spots to start up again. Ray’s was one of the first to come back. It’s in a little spot in a Chinatown food court, and even post-quake, the line is always nuts. I nearly went insane waiting for our turn.
I’m still high on the meth, although I’m no longer in super-mega-ultra-apocalypse PK mode. There’s an uncomfortable hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that’s been building for the past half hour though – a feeling I’m trying real hard to ignore. And I can’t stop clenching my muscles. My shoulders and lats and quads are tight and hard, almost vibrating.
The food court is rammed, despite it being only noon. A seething mess of noisy people, making the already-sweltering space even hotter. It’s elbow-room only at the tables, whole families jammed up against construction workers and business people in suits, the floor a mess of discarded serviettes and food splatters. Places like Ray’s have become focal points for entire sections of the city – buzzing hangouts where you’re almost certain to see somebody you know, no matter the time of day.
Once we retrieved our van – which, thank fuck, wasn’t too far from the Main Street Bridge – it took us for ever to find a place to park here. Guess not even an apocalyptic earthquake can solve LA’s parking problem. All the same, the sheer number of people out getting food gives me hope. LA’s hurting, but it isn’t dead yet.
There’s not one but two chicken sandwiches for me, a quartet of jumbo tenders for Africa, with shake fries and collard greens. Annie has a slim plate of wings. She’s barely looked at me since we left the Main Street Bridge. Africa’s attention, though, has been entirely on me. My little meth episode horrified him, even if it was accidental. He kept asking me if I’m OK, offering me water over and over again until I wanted to hit him.
The dose of meth he and Annie got wasn’t anywhere nearly as big as mine. They’re already coming down, and although neither of them look especially comfortable, and probably won’t be for a while, they’re going to make it out OK.
Not sure I can say the same for me. I am still flying.
I smash through the first sandwich in four giant bites, every cell in my body awake and screaming for sustenance. When it’s done, my tray is a mess of dribbled sauce and pickles, but I don’t care. I smack my lips, reach for the second sandwich. Annie has hardly touched her wings. She’s just sitting, shoulders tense, not looking at anything.
I tease out a hunk of pickle jammed between my teeth. “Your food OK?”
She doesn’t respond.
“Annie? Earth to Annie? If it’s bad, we can send it back. Or is it not hot enough? They’d probably give you some sauce in a cup if you want.”
I trail off when Africa gives me a minute shake of the head. He’s chewing at a tender, arms tucked in so he doesn’t jab the woman sitting next to him.
He’s right. I should leave it alone. Annie’s got a lot of shit to deal with, and if she wants to sit and stew, that’s fine.
Except: the part of my brain that understands this isn’t in control. I’m still vaguely pissed at Annie for getting angry with me, for no goddamn reason. This feeling sits alongside the joy I’m getting from my sandwich, and they are not easy roommates. It’s bringing out a weird passive-agressive vibe in me that I’m not sure I like.
“Here,” I say, offering her my second sandwich. “You should try this. It’s really fucking good.”
“I’m fine,” she mutters, not looking at me, her voice almost swallowed by the noise of the crowd.
“I don’t know what they do to it. I think it’s the marinade, but it might also be the oil? I get the feeling they fry the stuff in chilli oil. I saw a trick like that once on—”
“I’m fine.”
It’s a snarl, backed up by a flash of anger on her face, a look so harsh and sudden that I actually lean back a little.
I take a bite of my second sandwich, to stop myself saying anything else. It doesn’t taste nearly as good as the first one. The headache at the base of my skull is more insistent now, as is the yawning emptiness in the pit of my stomach. My fucking shoulders are starting to ache – I can’t relax them, no matter how much I roll my neck. I’m clenching my teeth, too, and my legs are starting to tremble. I don’t feel good any more. And I have a horrible feeling it’s about to get a lot worse.
Africa has noticed. “You are lucky. It was powder, not rocks. That means the chemicals were weak. You must keep drinking water, OK? Because you are going to crash, and much worse than Annie and I are now. And after we are done here—”
“Dude, I’m fine.”
“Maybe now. Maybe for a few more hours. But then…” He shakes his head, no doubt thinking of his girlfriend. “You think you know, but you don’t. You will want more, and Teggan, you cannot let yourself take any.”
His voice is making my headache worse. “I won’t. Can we drop this? Please?”
He looks like he wants to keep going. Instead, he goes back to his food, shaking his head. Like he doesn’t understand.
We sit in silence for a few minutes. I will myself to eat that second sandwich… and can’t do it.
Africa finishes another tender. “OK, so. Now that the job is finished, we must talk about what to do next. Mrs Tanner will want a full report. Especially about the thing with the bridge. We must make sure to tell her that the Legends, they won’t be a problem any more, huh?”
I finally swallow. “Got that right.” I prod the air with a hunk of sandwich. “Cook meth in my city, get a bridge shoved up your ass.”
“Eh, take this serious.” He puts down his next tender, locks eyes with me. “We cannot just say, hey, we took care of the problem. There are still the guns. And it is important for us to be honest – and she has to know what happened when your power go crazy from the meth, huh?” He holds up a hand. “I know you say there are no videos and what what, but you cannot be sure. And I know lots of people see it anyway. Even in here, people are talking about it.”
“Who cares?” I grin, an expression that feels like I have to wedge it onto my face with a crowbar. The headache is starting to get gnarly now, a furnace at the back of my head. “Let them talk. You hear some of the stories coming out of LA these days? You know there are a bunch of people who swear blind they saw an actual devil – like a horned devil – crawling out a quake crack in Pomona? You think anybody’s go
nna believe—?”
“Not sure that’s the same thing as you throwing a bunch of shit around the LA River,” Annie mutters.
I blink at her. “The what?”
“The LA River, man.”
“What river? That was a storm drain.”
“Eh, come now,” Africa says. “No distraction. We must talk about—”
“You cannot be this dense,” says Annie.
“Rude. I’m not dense, I’m just confused. That was a river?”
Annie glances at Africa. “Back me up here.”
“Yes yes, the LA River, I know. Now, when we talk to Mrs Tanner—”
I blink. “What fucking river are you guys talking about?”
“Jesus Christ.” Annie pulls out her phone, dials up Google Maps. She un-pinches her fingers to zoom out on a map of LA, tapping on a winding path that bisects the city, north to south. “Here. Runs from the Santa Susana Mountains all the way to Long Beach.”
“That’s a river?” I say.
“Yes!”
“But it was… that’s a storm drain!”
“Culvert, technically, but whatever. Army Corps of Engineers buried the river in concrete in the late thirties, after this massive flood. Now all that’s left is that channel of water running down the middle – easier to control, I guess. And to be fair, they didn’t concrete the whole thing. There are spots up in Glendale, where it’s still an actual river, with banks and plants and shit.”
I don’t ask how Annie knows all this stuff. She’s big into the history of LA, always has been. And while I’m not happy that she’s giving me shit – again – at least she’s participating. She’s not shutting us out. And the conversation distracts me from my head and my stomach and my iron-hard, vibrating muscles.
“It’s basically falling apart, anyway,” Annie is saying. “Concrete’s all fucked up, mostly because the Engineer Corps can’t build for shit. They’re the ones who did the levees in New Orleans – remember Katrina?”
“But how can they even do that?” Africa says, pointing at Annie’s phone. “It must be a big river, yaaw.”
“Of course it was big. Took ’em twenty years. But they got it done. Just up and wiped a whole river out of existence under a shit-ton of concrete. Anyway, Teagan, you can’t seriously tell me you don’t know about it.”
“I—”
“You’re telling me…” Annie closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “You’re telling me you’ve been in LA for over two years, doing a job where we drive back and forth across the river—?”
“Storm drain,” I mutter. Fuck, are my eyes vibrating? It feels like it. I’m twitchy and hot, nervous, irritable.
“River, three or four times a week… and you just never register that it’s there? What about LA River Drive? What you think they named that after?”
“… River Phoenix?”
She sighs, dropping her head and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Fuck me, you just live in your own world, don’t you?”
Africa clears his throat pointedly. “When we meet with Reggie, we must explain everything so she can make a full report to Mrs. Tanner.”
“Yeah, OK.” I should eat the last bite of my sandwich, still oozing delicious sauce. But I’m not hungry any more. Not even a little bit. “Why you got such a hard-on for Tanner anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been doing this for months now. Mrs Tanner says, and what would Mrs Tanner think, and we must tell Mrs Tanner. What gives, dude?”
The words coming out of my mouth are nasty, childish even. I don’t like them even as I say them, and I’m starting to feel pretty nasty and childish myself. Is it the meth talking? Or me?
Then again, Tanner isn’t exactly my favourite person right now. We know she’s been investigating where the earthquake kid, Matthew Schenke, came from – a place in New Mexico that he called the School. And yet, I have no idea what Tanner has found, if she’s found anything. She’s shared diddly-squat. She’s no slouch, which means she must have something… but her keeping us in the dark, pissing around with losers like the Legends when there’s a bigger threat out there, is starting to grate. Africa being intent on pleasing her makes it worse.
I expect him to get angry, like Annie, but he just sits quietly for a moment, nodding to himself, as if genuinely considering it.
“It is difficult, what she does,” he says eventually. I swear his voice has gotten deeper, his Senegalese accent more pronounced. “She is trying to do good things in a world that is not good. It is not right that we lie to her. That is not fair.”
“Might be easier if she was less of an asshole,” I mutter. God, why do I sound so fucking petty?
“She is not an asshole.”
“She totally is.”
Abruptly, Annie gets up, pushing her tray back.
“You’re done already?” I say.
“Mm.” She winces as she tries to lever her leg out from under the table without kicking the person next to her. “I’ll catch y’all later.”
“Where are you going?”
She looks right at me then. And I swear, there’s the ghost of that look she gave me after the bridge collapse. The one I couldn’t figure out.
“Home,” she says. “Reggie wants me, tell her I’ll be in tomorrow.”
Africa leans across – he’s got the reach for it – and squeezes her shoulder. I want to do something similar, make up for being such an ass before. She doesn’t deserve that. But I’m on the other side of the table, and it’s way too awkward. My teeth itch. Can you even have itchy teeth?
All at once, an image flickers into my mind: an old anti-drug poster, or internet ad, or something. An addict, mouth slightly open to reveal brown, rotting stumps. Meth mouth. It takes everything I have not to retch. No way I’m letting that happen.
“You not need a lift?” Africa says to Annie. “We have the van back now.”
“Nah, I’m good. One of my boys can come pick me up. Or I’ll Uber or something.”
I wince. Ridesharing has come back to LA, which is good, but we aren’t talking dozens of cars on the road. She could be waiting a while.
The whole city is like that at the moment. Superficially OK, but very far from back to normal. Right after the quake, there was a lot of international assistance to help us get back on our feet. The Japanese, especially, helped out with rebuilding some of the freeways – they know a thing or two about how to survive earthquakes. But then some politicians in Congress made a stink about it, and there were federal funding investigations, and lawsuits, and leaked memos, and before long Los Angeles was stuck swimming in place. Whatever rebuilding money there was got rerouted through a dozen different agencies and local government groups, all of which seem to hate each other, and none of which seem to know what to do with the cash. It makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.
Annie nods to us, turning to go, sidestepping around a smiling, overweight man juggling a baby and a tray of food. As she does, I get a look past her to the other side of the food court.
Nic Delacourt is here.
He’s sitting with a group of buddies at one of the green plastic tables, all of them sharing a huge bucket of chicken. They’re all wearing old, mud-spattered clothes and yellow high-vis vests.
Which is strange as hell, because Nic is a lawyer, working for the District Attorney’s office. Last time I checked, judges didn’t permit high-vis vests in courtrooms. He’d been volunteering with quake relief, I know that much… but it’s the middle of the day, on a weekday. Wouldn’t he be at the courthouse in Inglewood?
Nic has his back to me, but I’d recognise him anywhere. He’s big, with broad shoulders and a bald head shining under the court’s bright lights. He’s doing a very Nic thing – gesturing wildly as he eats, making a point with a chicken drumstick, waving it in the air. He must be in the middle of a story, or a joke; everyone else at the table is listening to him intently, good-natured smiles on their faces. They look tired, wear
y even… but happy.
And I can picture the expression on Nic’s face without even thinking about it.
I shut my eyes, take a deep breath. Of all the things I do not need to think about now, my sort-of-ex-crush is at the top of the list.
Africa frowns, follows my gaze. “Hey – it’s your boyfriend, huh?”
“Uh, no.”
“No, it is. It’s Nic, ya?”
“I mean, he’s not my boyfriend—”
“Hey! Nic! We over here!”
I have never wanted to stick a fork in someone’s eye so badly. Just fucking jam it in there.
“Dude, it’s fine,” I hiss through my clenched, grinding teeth. Nic still hasn’t responded, so maybe I can shut this down before it starts.
But no, Nic’s heard his name, he’s looking up, and now Africa is waving.
I have to resist the urge to leap across the table and break his arm. Not that I’d be able to. Trying to stop him saying hello to someone we know in a public place would be like trying to restrain a hundred-pound German shepherd from eating a fresh rib-eye.
And now Nic is getting up, a strange expression on his face – the weird look you get when you don’t quite recognise the person shouting your name, and are frantically trying to remember if you’ve met them before.
“I’m Africa.” My dipshit colleague’s voice is a sonic boom over the food court.
“No!” I twist my body around, wishing I had invisibility powers instead of psychokinesis. “No. Shut the fuck up. Africa!”
“I work with Teggan! For the China Shop!”
Nic is halfway over to us when he spots me. It’s at the exact distance where it’s too awkward for him to turn around and pretend he didn’t.
His expression goes from puzzlement, to annoyance, and then to a kind of controlled blankness. He pauses for a second, then slowly makes his way over.
Nic and I were friends for a long time, joined at the hip by a mutual love of food. He knows about my ability – I may or may not have dragged him headfirst into one of our escapades last year. In the past, I’ve wanted to date him. He’s wanted to date me. The problem is, those two things have never happened at the same time.